[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

A decade ago there was at least Silk Road and similar, offering something tangible in exchange for cryptocurrencies, now the best you can get is a half-assed El Salvador experiment with too many issues to list (but to give two examples, imagine not being able to pay for stuff because AWS's US-East-1 went down, or waking up as a "millionaire" because the app had an integer overflow).

I have no idea what the tone was when these critiques were given, but is it possible that this was not a case of "You're a bad dev, look at these problems" as much as "You're a young dev, let me help show you some mistakes so we can do better in the future and make you a good dev."?

Critique is part of learning. And it can bum you out. But it sounds like you already know some of it is valid, and you have rebuttals for other stuff you can hash out. To me, this sounds like a terrific opportunity to improve communication and start making this a productive mentoring relationship.

I could be totally off base - but I'd just consider the possibilities before you assume negative intent.

One of the things I needed to learn in a real job was that if things aren't going well they need to know loudly and early in order to fix it. They can't allocate resources if they don't know things are behind.

If they don't see progress, what I hear is that they want more regular updates about what is being done because while you may be making progress on things it's not being recorded in a way that reminds them about it. That is frustrating and takes some effort to handle. You could send them more emails that feel unnecessary to you but are intended to make them feel involved and up to date. You could simply write down what you accomplished each week so that you can be specific about it.

I hope it works out okay, it sounds like either your manager needs to do a much better job backing you up or else there may be some maybe not too bad communication steps that can be taken to make them more confident about what is going on.

Do you have a weekly 1:1 with your manager?

After reflection some years later, I would say I was overly reacted / was overly emotional over it. But it's hard to feel that way at the time.

Alternately, after several more jobs and life experience, I have made the most money by jumping companies and not sitting still. I have also learned some bosses are just dicks / incompetent. That boss was niether, but some definitely are.

So, I don't know where you and your bosses fall. If you genuinely think they would fire you (have they fired others?), then it would be prudent to interview other places. If it just 'feels bad man's, try and take the hazing with some pride that you survived. Over time, they may just respect that you are tough.

Good luck!

I am trying to think of one way it was useful to tell you that, but I can’t.

Seems like you should feel justified in not being a fan of working under this person. What you do with that is hard to say. Sounds like you got to work on a cool project and got to mostly solo it. That’s pretty great for a junior.

One of the things that I've experienced with new grad junior devs is that there's an adjustment needed to change from academic working to business working. In academia, usually the professor gives an assignment and you have to go off and figure it out, without bothering the professor, no matter what. In business, it's much better to 'bother the professor' regularly and check in affirmatively on whether the assignment has changed, or to tell the manager about challenges that arise to re-plan together. As a junior employee, you're not going to know the full business context of what makes sense, and checking in can save weeks of time that would otherwise be spent off on your own.

Not sure if that's the case here, but certainly something you could consider going forwards to prevent similar situations.